An embodiment relates to a determination of road surface condition reflectivity of a traveled route.
Understanding the road surface conditions that a vehicle is encountering is very important for various functionality of a vehicle. Precipitation on the road surface may result in various control issues for the vehicle. Snow, water, or ice on the road of travel greatly reduces the coefficient of friction between the vehicle tires and the surface of the road resulting in vehicle stability issues. Various known systems can sense such a condition, but require a stimulus for the detection. For example, a system that senses precipitation on the road utilizing wheel slip may detect when the vehicle wheels have sudden increases in the speed of rotation of the wheel. While this operation is very good for identifying some type of precipitation on the road surface, the issue is the precipitation is already negatively impacting the vehicle operation. As a result, the vehicle must reactively make changes to the vehicle operation to reduce the effects of the precipitation already affecting the vehicle.
Identifying a road surface condition prior to the vehicle traveling on the precipitation allows a vehicle to proactively enable various safety driving features of a vehicle or make changes to the current vehicle operations to reduce the changes of the precipitation affecting the operations of the vehicle.